


nights nowadays

by frenchlymydear



Category: Plain Kate - Erin Bow
Genre: Gen, Linay thinking about Kate, a lot disjointed, incomplete and not likely to be completed bc this is an OLD-ass fic, no plot and no particular direction, old fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2011-10-16
Packaged: 2018-09-21 11:47:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9547814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frenchlymydear/pseuds/frenchlymydear
Summary: Linay finds himself thinking about Kate more often than he'd like. It's not buyer's remorse about the shadow, he thinks.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I find myself in a fandom that apparently doesn't exist on AO3, posting not-quite-fic that I wrote six years ago. Fun times. Comments appreciated.

When Kate arrives, Linay has been waiting for hours. Asking for her shadow, he’s not absent for a moment, knowing that if he is lenient, or kind, she’ll escape like the other ones did.

 

He stares at her with surprise when she does surrender her shadow. Somehow, despite this having been his only quest for the past years, he never considered the feeling of holding somebody’s _shadow_ ; and despite his sister’s death leading him to think about cutting his own shadow away, he is still not prepared for the moment when Kate’s hallowed eyes show the first sign of not being completely there, and for a moment he feels a terrible remorse that pushes him to her feet.

“Thank you,” he says.

And Kate nods uncertainly. It occurs to him: she doesn’t know that she’ll soon be little more than a shadow herself. He admires her enough to wish that she finds security for a while in some found family. He despises himself enough to wish that their paths never again cross.

 

* * *

 

One night, when the rusalka is fed, he returns to his quarters and sits on his bed. What he is thinking as he stares at the open cut on his wrist makes him feel both betrayed and ashamed. He rubs the edge of the wound and feels he that he is entitled to absolution. Feels that she ( _Lenore? Kate? Lenore. Kate?_ ) could grant it to him, and that’s what makes him feel shame: he can no longer remember which forsaken, shadowless girl he is trying to help.

He’s almost certain now that taking Kate’s shadow was the wrong thing to do. It does nothing for his insomnia, to lie and think of the mismatched eyes, and white hair, and wild brown locks, and sweet smiles and smart remarks. All it does is pull him underwater. He surfaces from his own thoughts, gasping. 

 

When he haunts his old family, only his little niece will acknowledge him. She brings him bowls of food and watches the river pulling at his boat’s tethers as he eats. “ _Mira_?” he smiles at her one day, and she does not come back the next day. He leaves that evening, setting sail again, feeling more a ghost than human. The rusalka saps his strength, the memories take his pride and burnish it, and in his mind Kate’s eyes follow him distrustfully as he walks through the town square of each new town.

 

* * *

 

He visits the square where they burned his sister. He goes wrapped in scarves, his white hair hidden, and speaking to no person. The conviction that this square needs to burn grows stronger. He thinks that he will be the one to turn each soulless person to ashes and does not consider how far from his true intentions he has strayed. He failed to be the witch, but when he can not bring himself to rise out of the bed most mornings, this seems less disappointing.

 

He meets Kate. His strength is all gone, but his cunning is not. She is friendless, without a family or home, and he binds her resilience to himself in exchange for... he is not sure what he is offering her. Perhaps solidarity. Perhaps he is trying to give her a life again, but her shadow is his now, now almost the dead witch’s shadow, and it is for this reason that they stand together on the boat as she cuts her arm in his stead. The rusalka feeds on her that evening.

He can not feel any love for the monster in the river; the revulsion for the bones that lie below on the riverbed’s shifting body has taken the love and pushed it overboard. It’s a raw, open revulsion. He can not allow this to continue to happen to Kate. He continues to let it happen.

 

When he learns that Kate’s "family", the only solace that she held for a few precious weeks was with his old family, he listens with horror to her as she talks. He’s remembered what it was that he wanted after Lenore was taken away. He wanted his soul to be whole.

Kate will fade to nothing because of what he has done, he knows. There is nothing he can offer her, so he suggests that they part. It’s only his weakness that allows him to say this: their contract is unbreakable, really, but distance will grant her time to die out in a place of her choosing, in the way that she chooses, even. Linay knows the importance of this penultimate choice, and Kate is only now learning. She leaves him, without a shadow when she goes, but not faded or jaded, a little despicable like him now, but if her damned cat will associate with her when it will not with him, she is still short of some reproach.

 

* * *

 

 

The days, they pass. The nights, they crave. He grows weak again.

Day. Night. Day. Wake. Blood from the cut. Sink into the bed again. The little boat weaves through the water without direction, and yet bound for one river port only. His thoughts keep him awake and fevered. Night. Day.

 

He wonders when Kate will fade.


End file.
